Kind Are Her Answers (17 page)

“Come in,” he said.

The door opened, apologetically, to admit the elderly maid from the Fraser’s flat. She scarcely ever came with messages; the men had a house telephone between their surgeries, and Fraser was overpunctilious, if anything, about interference out of hours. Kit was delighted to see her but wondered what she could want.

“Oh, Dr. Anderson, sir. I’m so sorry to trouble you so early, but Mrs. Fraser said would you be good enough to step down before surgery and see Dr. Fraser? He isn’t very well and she doesn’t think he’ll be able to see his patients to-day.”

“Of course,” said Kit. “Tell Mrs. Fraser I’ll be down at once.”

He saw Janet looking at him as the door closed. Her face told him that she knew he would use this excuse to leave her without an answer, that after all she was relieved and determined not to admit it to herself. He went over and kissed her quickly on the forehead. Each, for different reasons, avoided the other’s eyes.

“That settles it,” he said, “I’m afraid. Surgery will start late as it is, if I have to look him over first. I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong with the poor old boy.” Janet was reading the address on one of the envelopes in her hand. Looking past her, he said, “Don’t worry over things, my dear, you’re everything to me that I need you to be.”

He had no time to think the conversation over, for at the foot of the stairs Mrs. Fraser met him, with trouble sitting reluctantly on her broad healthy face.

Fraser was in bed, looking pinched and yellow and, unusual for him, every year of his age. He said that he had a gastric chill; he had had a call in the early morning, and been caught in a sharp shower.

“Not one of my cases, I hope?” said Kit. His feeling of guilt was reasonless; he supposed it must be becoming a habit.

“No, no, one of my own.” Fraser, with his practice on his mind, was impatient of irrelevances. He had been working till the last minute on a sheaf of notes for Kit. Before going over them he apologized, with his careful and rather ponderous courtesy, for giving his partner the extra work. He would not, he assured Kit, be hors de combat long enough to make a locum necessary.

Kit, not liking a sunk look about his eyes, tentatively suggested examining him; but the old man waved him away. He had had similar chills before, a matter of twenty-four hours; a little bismuth and a fluid diet would settle it. His thermometer and watch stood on the bedside table, but, with an obstinacy Kit remembered from other occasions, he kept their findings to himself.

Kit, whose programme had been fairly well filled already, went through to the small annex in which his consulting room was built, and looked at Fraser’s notes, written in a Victorian hand which combined an appearance of great symmetry and beauty with the elusiveness of a cryptogram. He took out his own notebook, put it side by side with the notes, and tried to correlate them into some kind of plan. He stared at them, together and apart, and stared again; but each time the grip of his brain slipped like the grip of a hand with a cut tendon. He could only wonder how he was going to see Christie, and, when this brought him back to the notes on the desk, stare at them and think of Christie again, and of what had happened in the night. He had had twenty-four hours with negligible sleep, but was too tired even to sort its effects from the rest of his trouble. After five minutes of it he pushed the notes on one side and rang for the first patient to be shown in.

The surgery, even with summary treatment, finished an hour late. Fraser’s patients, through contact or affinity, nearly all had a dash of Fraser about them. They were mostly middle-aged, liked to come to the point in their own time, and were full of leisured conversational gambits which had, in decency, to be followed up for a few minutes at least. The visits were the same, but more so. Additionally there was the case to which Fraser had been called up, a sub-acute abdominal on which Fraser wanted a second opinion. Kit, whose own ideas on the subject were perfectly clear-cut, had to ring up the consultant and pay a second visit in order to meet him. He had been able to stifle his private thoughts during work which he felt to be necessary; but the fuss and hanging about which this business involved brought up all his raw edges. The consultant, a friendly and cultured person with a zest for abstract discussion, drove home regretting the unimaginative parochialism of the provincial G.P.

The consultation, and subsequent arrangements with a nursing home, dragged on till nearly the end of the afternoon, leaving two or three more visits that could not safely be postponed. He plodded round them, followed by the knowledge that Christie must have been expecting him since the middle of the morning. He could have called for a moment between these cases, but his fatigue had got to the meticulous stage when each detail has to be cleared up in its exact order, for lack of confidence in future effort. They carried him on through teatime; it was falling dark when he got to Laurel Dene at last. There was just light enough to show him the blank eyes of the windows with their drawn-down blinds.

He rang, feeling unequal to the effort, which had somehow to be made, of facing Pedlow out. As it happened, he had nerved himself for nothing. The cook let him in, looking self-conscious, short of breath, and resentful—of her imposed office, Kit thought, rather than of him. There was no reason, he supposed, why she should not have done it often before in the course of Pedlow’s time off; but he had never known Pedlow to take any.

The cook asked him if he would kindly step into the drawing room.

Kit stared at her, and took an involuntary step down the hall. He supposed she meant the dining room; he had waited there once or twice, since Christie came.

“This way, sir,” said the cook. She opened the right-hand door.

Kit walked in, and stood still for a moment in the doorway. The drawing room had come back to itself. The bed had gone, the chest of drawers with its brushes and jars, the dressing gown thrown over the sofa and the slippers underneath it. His memory moving back over a couple of months, he realized that every occasional table, every vase, every photograph frame and nondescript silver object of art, had been arranged in its former place with the exactness of sacred vessels on which a ritual depends. The doors into the garden were shut. Looking again when the cook had gone, he saw the bolts drawn home.

Kit walked up and down the long room, which the cook had left in its half-twilight. There was a deadness in his heart which was beyond anxiety or fear. He was gripped by the power that symbols of disaster have to be more frightful than disaster itself, because they leave the imagination free. He stared through the closed glass doors into the garden, over whose tree-fringed sky thin pink clouds, like unmoving fishes, swam in the stream of the last light; and a procession of possibilities, each more horrible than the last, trampled his common sense underfoot. When the door opened at last, he seemed to swallow his heart while he waited for the news that would come in. But it was Christie, wearing a dark brown dress, her hair looking dark too in the shadows. She shut the door behind her and stood with her hand on it, as if she were afraid to leave it unguarded. Her face was pale and tightly stretched; she looked cold.

Shaken out of his own fears, Kit went over to her; but she was hard and unresponsive in his arms, looking not at him but over her shoulder at the door. He felt her hands resisting him as if they were doing it of themselves, and she would have restrained them if she could.

“It’s all right, dear,” he said.

She whispered, “Don’t say anything now. Some one will hear. It doesn’t take long to make out a certificate, does it? You’d better not stay longer than that.”

Kit tightened his hold. Her terror had jerked his reason into its needed reaction. “Nonsense. No one can do anything to either of us.” He spoke with an assurance that almost convinced himself. “Sit down here and talk to me.”

She pulled her hand out of his, and looked away.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Why did you leave me all day, Kit? It’s been … Why didn’t you come in the morning? I suppose you were busy, or something. But I just didn’t think you
could.”

He was dumb for a moment. She never reproached him, never asked for explanations. If he offered them, she always seemed to have accepted them beforehand. He felt, not so much a sense of injustice as a difficulty in finding his feet.

“Fraser’s ill,” he said at last. “I’ve had to see his patients as well as mine. You know I’d have come if it was humanly possible to do it. I could hardly work for thinking of you, as it was.”

“You do look tired,” she said, and absently gave his arm a maternal pat. “But, Kit, all day? Would all those people have actually died if you hadn’t been there?”

“Well, no, of course not. But they were all people who had to be seen.”

She peered at him a little, as if she were trying to see him in a better light. Thoughtfully and without resentment, she said, “You’re different from me, aren’t you? I mean, I see you were right, but if it had been me I couldn’t have helped going to you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right. I didn’t mean to be silly about it.” She looked up at him, solemnly. “I like you being better than me.”

“Don’t be a baby,” he said; her candour touched him to the point of awkwardness. “I’ve come to talk to you about Pedlow. Now listen. You’re not to let her upset you. I’ll deal with her. If she tries to start anything, come straight to me. What’s she been saying to you?”

“Nothing.”

Kit nodded, his expectations confirmed.

“That’s what’s so horrible,” Christie said.

“What about this room, then?”

“She just did that. She moved my things to the spare room as soon as I was up. She didn’t ask me, or anything. I’ve hardly seen her. She spent the rest of last night—in there—I think.”

“I see. What about having the light on?”

Christie went over to the switch. The dusty crystal chandelier leaped into life, its facets reflected in the silver on the mahogany tables. Kit narrowed his eyes against it; it accented a certain grimness in his face. He sat down beside Christie on the brocade settee.

“Have you got any money?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve got seventeen pounds, but most of it’s in the Post Office. I could get some to-morrow if it wasn’t more than three pounds. How much would you like?”

Kit’s jaw relaxed a little in spite of himself. “Little lunatic, I don’t want any. I was only wondering whether she’d start by trying to blackmail you or me. Your being out of it simplifies things. If she tries it with me I shall go to the police. Anything’s better: you agree to that?”

She stared at him. “Blackmail you?
Pedlow?
You must be mad.”

“I don’t think so. Doctors are favourite subjects, you know. I’ve been more or less prepared since last night. Don’t worry; your name won’t be dragged in.”

“But, Kit—you didn’t think Pedlow was like
that?”
Her eyes were blank with bewilderment; she stammered as she sought for words. “Why, Pedlow—Pedlow would die before she’d steal a safety pin off my dressing table. How
could
you think—don’t you see, that’s why she frightens me.”

Kit looked at her, in compassion for her simplicity. “I think you’ll find—” he began.

“Oh, Kit, don’t be
silly.
When you live with a person who hates you, you get to know them. Besides, Pedlow’s got plenty of money. She won’t know how to spend it, as it is. It isn’t money she wants.”

“How do you know?”

“Aunt Amy’s left her a lot of money. Most of what she’s got, I think. She wanted to alter her will and leave some of it to me. It was terrible; she kept saying would I remind her to ring up her lawyer. I had an awful job, sometimes, to put her off. It would have been bad enough to take it when all the time I … But to have had something of Pedlow’s … It would have been like the gold they take from tombs, that kills you if you have it in the house. Thank God I managed not to let it happen.”

Kit patted her hand. He felt his whole body relaxing in relief.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he said.

“I didn’t think it was important.”

“But it explains everything. Her dislike of you, and spying about. Naturally, she was afraid for her expectations. No doubt your aunt had told her about the will; she was open about things, and fond of her. Pedlow’s idea in watching you was that if the lawyer actually called, she could produce something against you and get your aunt to alter it again. She was too discreet to act unnecessarily. Now she knows her money’s safe she’s got no reason to make trouble. Your natural honesty’s saved the two of us. Queer that you didn’t see it yourself.”

“Do you think so?” said Christie without conviction.

“It’s obvious.”

“It sounds simple, put that way. … I don’t know, though. I’ve thought, once or twice, that Pedlow
wanted
me to be after Aunt Amy’s money. It would have given her a sort of advantage over me. Sometimes I think when she finds I wasn’t, she’ll hate me more than ever. I know it sounds silly when you’re being so practical, but it seems to me there were only two things she cared about, Aunt Amy and being more righteous than any one else. … She got out all my boxes this morning, and dusted them.”

“Well, that was quite a natural thing to do.”

“I saw her face as she was doing it, before she saw me.

“Darling, you’ve been through a lot and you’re fancying things.”

“Yes, perhaps it will all look different in the morning. Only—well, this morning I wanted to go in to—to look at Aunt Amy. I thought I’d feel better in her room. I was happy with her, you know; I never had time to tell you much about that. Pedlow passed me in the hall, and just looked at me. It—it made me feel as if I were a murderer going to gloat over some one I’d killed. I haven’t dared to go even near the door, since. I knew I’d find her waiting.”

“She’s upset, that’s all.”

“I suppose so. I wish I wasn’t so frightened all the time.”

“It’s the house; the blinds and everything.” He put his arm round her shoulders. Pedlow had grown dim in his mind, Christie near and warm. He could only remember that in a few days she would have gone away. The comfort he offered her covered a longing to demand it for himself. “Get out of doors as much as you can. Look, that reminds me. I’ve brought you a bottle of pick-me-up, and a sedative for the night. Don’t forget to take them. You’ll feel better after a proper sleep.”